Google CEO to news biz: Shut up!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt must be having a tough year. Media organizations, especially News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, have been picking on Google for destroying their business. They blame the Internet giant for giving away their content for free and stealing their ad revenue.

The blame game came to a head last week when reports surfaced that Microsoft was in talks about giving Bing the exclusive indexing rights to News Corp. content. That would yank News Corp. content, including that from The Wall Street Journal, off of Google News – which Murdoch also has threatened to do on his own.

More reports revealed that Microsoft was in talks with The Associated Press and other publishers, at least on the topic of news on Bing, but was unlikely to pay for exclusive indexing rights. Since then, Microsoft has said it currently has “no real intent” to pay off publishers.

With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue – for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

Translation: Shut your overstuffed pie holes, you grumbling antiques. You were dying by the cell long before our superior technology arrived to save the day and help you out of your sorry mess.

Plus, we toss you all that traffic and you still manage to fumble our perfect pass like the pikers you are. (In truth, you are Charlie Brown and we are Lucy.)

Also, have you ever heard of “fair use.” It’s the law now and we can hire more lobbyists in Washington, D.C., than you with our bazillions and gamillions of dollars we make from all those tiny little blue links.

You do realize I have a key to the the White House and visit more times than Joe Biden?